El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires, Argentina is one of the most beautiful bookstroes that I have ever visited. The grand theater, built in 1919, was converted into a bookstore in 2000. The theater boxes and orchestra level are now filled with bookshelves, as well as the basement below. A coffee shop is located on what used to be the stage. When I visited, the architecture and design section was the first row from the stage – perfect!

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I’m going back to the classics. Current read: The Illiad. Next up: The Odyssey. I just love saying the name Agamemnon.

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I’m going back to school tomorrow, at least for one course! I am starting a language course in Aymara, which meets three nights a week at one of the local private universities. Wish me luck!

The language has attracted interest because it is based on a three value logic system and thus supposedly has better expressiveness than many other languages based on binary logic.

It is cited by the author Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility, capable of accommodating many neologisms. Ludovico Bertonio published Arte de la lengua aymara in 1603. He remarked that the language was particularly useful for expressing abstract concepts.

Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego’s back to the past. The English sentences prepare for what lies before us and we are facing a prosperous future, and possibly the word 未來 (lit. not yet come, meaning future) exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is typologically a rare phenomenon.